Should unArchive any Mac OS 10.x installation. Requires another Macintosh computer running Mac OS 10.2 - 10.3 (as tested), or hard drive with Mac OS X system software (other than the drive that is. The Unarchiver is a free program for Mac to archive files to extract. The program supports more compression formats than the default tool in Mac OS. In addition, The Unarchiver is a nice design, and supports foreign characters (such as those from the Japanese language).
Is there some command line tool which allows extracting files from most known archive types? Something like StuffIt Expander, but without gui.
Arjan5 Answers
The Unarchiver has two command line utilities since version 2.5 according to the website:
Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more and less obscure formats. [..] If you have a compressed file that The Unarchiver does not open, please post a bug on the bug tracker, and include the file in question, and I will look into whether it is possible to add support for it!
[..]
There are now two command-line utilities available, unar
and lsar
, which can be used to unpack and list archives, respectively. They are still in development and not really feature-complete, but they should work. These are available as precompiled binaries for both OS X and Windows on the download page, and can also be built on Linux.
To download the command line tools (not included in the regular The Unarchiver download!), go to the project's google code downloads page and select unar0.2.zip
(works as of September 20, 2010).

Try 7-Zip. In addition to its own native format (.7z) it can handle the following extensions: ZIP, gzip, bzip2, tar and, in betas for version 9, xz. It can also decompress (only) in the following formats: ARJ, CAB, CHM, cpio, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.
A Windows command line version 7za.exe
is included. For other platforms, a POSIX version named p7zip
is available from the P7ZIP SourceForge project, and some of those ports are also linked from 7-Zip's download page. Unfortunately, the Mac link seems broken, so for OS X, either build it yourself or use MacPorts.
EDIT: For non-Windows versions go to the Downloads page. There you can find the source as well as pre-compiled binaries.
Joe CasadonteJoe CasadonteIf you happen to use Homebrew, you can install atool
and extract many archive types like so:
Assuming the corresponding external programs are available on your system, it can handle:
.tar.gz
, .tgz
, .tar.bz
, .tbz
, .tar.bz2
, .tbz2
, .tar.Z
, .tZ
, .tar.lzo
, .tzo
, .tar.lz
, .tlz
, .tar.xz
, .txz
, .tar.7z
, .t7z
, .tar
, .zip
, .jar
, .war
, .rar
, .lha
, .lzh
, .7z
, .alz
, .ace
, .a
, .arj
, .arc
, .rpm
, .deb
, .cab
, .gz
, .bz
, .bz2
, .gz
, .bz
, .bz2
, .Z
, .lzma
, .lzo
, .lz
, .xz
, .rz
, .lrz
, .7z
, .cpio
atool
is a script for managing file archives of various types (tar, tar+gzip, zip etc).
The main command is aunpack
which extracts files from an archive. Did you ever extract files from an archive, not checking whether the files were located in a subdirectory or in the top directory of the archive, resulting in files scattered all over the place? aunpack
overcomes this problem by first extracting to a new directory. If there was only a single file in the archive, that file is moved to the original directory. aunpack
also prevents local files from being overwritten by mistake.
The other commands provided are apack
(to create archives), als
(to list files in archives), and acat
(to extract files to standard out). As atool
invokes external programs to handle the archives, not all commands may be supported for a certain type of archives.
atool
identifies archives by their file extension. Sometimes this is not possible - for instance rar archives usually have varying numeric file extensions. In those cases when atool
can't identify the format, file
is used instead. (atool
can be configured not to use file.)
You can use brew install unar
or brew install atool
and then:
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For the compression and archiving types that Mac OS X knows natively, you can just use open
, and it'll invoke 'Archive Utility' (formerly BOMArchiveHelper), just like double-clicking it from the Finder would have. This works for [pk]zip, gzip, bzip, bzip2, tar, pax, cpio, compress (.Z), etc. etc.
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If you have apps installed that know how to unarchive other formats, and they have registered for those file extensions or magic(5)
values, then the open
command will launch those apps to handle those types. Of course you'll probably end up in those apps' GUIs.
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protected by Daniel Beck♦Aug 29 '12 at 15:19
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